October 2013 Edition #15: TOWER OF EVIL

Director: Jim O’Connolly
Screenplay: George Baxt (original story) & Jim O’Connolly
Starring: Bryant Halliday, Jill Haworth, Anna Palk, William Lucas, Jack Watson)
Release Date: May 19th, 1972


TOWER OF EVIL is a unique for its era melding of two sub-genres I thoroughly enjoy, those being gothic British horror and the trashy slasher epic. Released six years before John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN set the standard by which all slashers would follow, director Jim O’Connolly takes the moody atmosphere and gloomy settings common in the films produced by Hammer and Amicus and populates them with a group of characters so unpleasant and hyper-sexualized that they rival any of the overly-promiscuous teens in the FRIDAY THE 13th series.

The story kicks off with two sailors approaching the fog-enshrouded Snape Island, a hellishly rocky isle whose on which stands an ancient lighthouse. Once there, the two discover the aftermath of a massacre, the dismembered and corpses of three nude American teens, and one naked, screaming girl (Candace Glendenning) who kills the eldest of the men in self defense and falls into a state of catatonia. Back on the mainland the girl is subjected to a ridiculous psychological battery involving strobing colored lights akin to EXORCIST II, with the hopes of hearing her side of the story via hypnosis. We are then treated to a sort of mini slasher film as the girl offers vague recollections of her and her friends arriving on the island, immediately getting high, engaging in naked pillow fights (I might have made that up) and getting violently offed by a shadowy figure with a very hairy, greasy forearm. There is so much unnecessary nudity packed into this five minute montage it’s just… it’s just delightful!

Scotland Yard believes Penelope is responsible for the murders and considers the case closed, and at this point the plot shifts focus to Evan Brent (Halliday) a private investigator hired by Penelope’s family who hitches a ride to the island with a group of archaeologists intent on exploring the island for treasure after a spear used to impale one of Penelope’s friends is determined to be of Phoenician origin. These guys….man, these scientists are the randiest group of professionals I’ve ever seen. As soon as they set sail for the island, the characters shift focus to who’s fucking who, and it just, again, delightful. The main characters we follow are Rose (Haworth) and Nora (Palk), who are openly fighting over Nora’s husband, also on the expedition. Nora cheats on her man…..a lot. And she also knows Rose has been sleeping with her husband, and watching these two snipe at each other is just a treat. “You’re a hard bitch, Nora!” is just a sample of some of the wonderful dialogue these two throw at each other over the course of the film.

Once our group reaches the island they do absolutely zero science-ing, as Nora lights up and kills three joints on her own before going off and boffing Brom (Gary Hamilton), the nephew of the surviving sailor from the film’s opening, Hamp Gurney (Watson). Nora, I must say, is just the sluttiest slut to slut her way across the screen in the history of cinematic slut-dom. The entire midsection of this film concerns her slutty doings, as she sluts around sluttily, getting her slut-juice everywhere.




It’s pretty awesome.

"Damn, I'm nasty!"

Needless to say, people start getting it on, and the mysterious hairy slime-armed madman who may or may not be the inbred offspring of Hamp’s insane brother, who might also be living a feral lifestyle in the caves beneath the island while worshipping a giant statue of the ancient Phoenician demon Ba’al, starts violently slicing his way through the cast. It’s…..pretty fucking sweet.

TOWER OF EVIL really was ahead of it’s time as far as setting up the slasher film tropes that we would all be familiar with by the end of the coming decade, but in my opinion manages to surpass those films with it’s blunt sexuality and gratuity. The characters are all rather spiteful and get what they deserve, and the violence, especially for a British horror film of this era, is astonishingly unrestrained and gooey. Despite some truly awful dialogue and lackluster performances from most of the male leads, O’Connolly keeps a tight pace, with nary a second of the film passing without a titty or a stabbing or a random psychedelic epileptic montage courtesy of the crazy Technicolor hypnosis device used by Penelope’s psychiatrist. To top it all off, despite the film’s trashy underpinnings the film looks fantastic. Shot on some nicely detailed and gloomy sets at Shepperton Studios, it looks like someone at least spent a decent chunk of change on the production design, especially the film’s fiery finale, which acts as double climax ala HALLOWEEN and pretty much every other slasher film which tricks us into thinking the killer is dead only to bring him back a few minutes later.

TOWER OF EVIL is dirty and grimy, violent as hell and sexy as shit. I don’t expect to get this level of perverse enjoyment out of most British horror, so this flick came as a grand surprise. If you enjoy the old-school pleasures of Hammer’s classic horror features but just wish for once that Christopher Lee would stab someone in the tits with a battle axe….well, you’re still out of luck as far as that goes, but TOWER OF EVIL comes fairly goddamned close to that experience, offering a fascinating middle ground between the restrained style of the old guard in British horror and the purely exploitative awesomeness that would follow in the ensuing decade. It’s a blast!

My Rating:
8/10